ORIGIN

They weren't losing. The leadership of the nation of Kalizal was not losing. They'd survived generations of outright warfare with their neighbors, the people of Alv. They'd build their cities of black rock on the faces of dormant volcanos, and used the deadly, shifting shale of the upward paths as their defense. Their walls were imposing black obelisks that stood out against the smoke-filled air of this world, appearing like monoliths as one drew close, warding against any attack. The ballistas, the trebuchets, the boiling and flaming oil, the rock-falls... they had numerous defenses to rain down on those damn Alvian raids.

Alv... The raiders. The steppe-folk, all black chainmail and deer-mounted bowmen, throwing-bombs and spears. They were notorious for their lightning assaults, their decimation of trade routes. Nobody could remember how long the two nations had been at war on this dying world, this place of black rock and pluming lava. Nobody could remember how the wars had started.

Kalizal had prepared an assault to end all assaults: a war-party of their own. One that would ride down their mountains, a rare descent from their fortresses of steam and churning smoke. Their soldiers would leave the safety of their walls, the thump of their machinery, and encircle the Alvian capital of Alvar at dawn, when the raiders were likely to be only just returning. They'd prepare, and... Well.

"They were already dead," the scout panted. One of the few who'd seen it. One of the few who'd made it back inside of those precious walls.

The military leadership hadn't understood, at first. Disease? (they'd asked.) A flood, a fire? "Th-they were... eaten, s-sir."

Eaten. They were processing this when the horns began to blow, discordant and deafening, filling the city. The walls all went on alert at once. The leadership--suspecting an Alvian counter-attack--rushed to the walls.

What they found was... monsters. Beasts the likes of which this rocky world had never seen. Monstrosities with scything limbs and glowing eyes, slavering jaws--sometimes more than one--and a savagery unmatched by even the Rock Wolves to the north. The beasts tried the walls. Some of them made it over--climbing, flying. They wreaked havoc. By the time the ballistas and soldiers could take each out, circles of massacred soldiers and civilians were piled in circles of blood around their corpses.

The rest of the beasts circled back, stymied by the walls.

Kalizal's own army, still returning from the field, caught the monsters from behind. It didn't matter. The gates were closed, and could not open. While many of the beasts were cut down, the soldiers were forced to retreat. And the monsters followed them. No scouts could reach them, and the leadership--watching with dismay as many of the beasts peeled away from the walls to hunt (there could be no other word for it--it was no real battle)--had to assume the army was either dead, or fled.

But they were not losing.

They had been at war for generations. Their livestock, bred from the creatures of the volcanic fields; their underground farms, lit by lava-light... these had kept their cities alive for years while under siege. The black, smooth walls still stood. The burning oil still poured, and mined rocks still rained down. The beasts had fallen, one by one, though far too many yet remained.

All they had to do was survive. All they had to do was trust in their walls.

"So yeah you're gonna go under the walls," said the scrawny, overly-tall Valkhound before Gravedigger. It was picking its teeth, its perpetual grin widening. "Don't try to just come up and fight them. There's, like, a lot." It laughed, a raucous sound, and gestured to the distant city. "Make us openings. We'll use them! Some of us will die. It'll be GLORIOUS. We'll fucking wreck them first, 'course. Then, uh. What was it."

The beast paused, wracking its brain, consulting the orders it was meant to pass on. Loose orders, though; there was no real hierarchy here. Just demons, unleashed. "Oh, right. You have big ears." A long forelimb reached out, a claw aiming to gently flick one, just in case Gravedigger didn't know where his ears were. "Listen for stuff that might be important. Important buildings. Leaders. Dig it all down from underneath. Uhh. Leadership. Important machines. Whatever." It pulled a bone from its teeth at last, tossing it aside, and licked its jaws with a too-long, glowing tongue. "And destabilize the walls. Dig those down if you can. They can hold out awhile. But honestly... do whatever. Don't die. Kill shit." It nodded wisely.

Enter: Gravedigger, a creature purpose-built to destroy Kalizal.

The city wasn't losing... yet.

As Gravedigger began his work, the other Valkhounds milled around. Some were coming and going from this loose almost-warcamp; arriving with severe injuries, limping and bleeding and telling happy war stories, or reporting the deaths of those who hadn't backed down. Others were just setting out, with some new plan to try and get past the walls. These small groups, though, often paused to watch the newcomer in their midst, and as the minutes ticked on, they started to linger. To watch.

The obvious question ("what's he doing?") became a repeated refrain, a question answered again and again by others who had already asked ("digging under the walls, Aglon said!"). Excitement soon became palpable, with the war parties choosing to stick close to the work-in-progress tunnel rather than setting out on their own. Gravedigger's work was obviously their best chance at ripping down that city quickly.

Someone was even kind enough to haul in food: a ragged, half-eaten deer-thing with black fur, its eyes already clouded with death and the saddle and bridle still stuck to its corpse. This was offered to Gravedigger, and the rest hung about the tunnel entrance, and waited.

As the work went on, the vibrations around the digging Valkhound changed. Rather than the occasional mild tectonic rumble, sporadic and distant, there came instead a constant churning up ahead. Something unnatural, like a rapid heartbeat in the rock ahead. The voices faded away behind him, and he was left in warm, smoky silence.

Eventually that heartbeat--an obvious beacon--was almost overhead. A few hundred yards forward, at the most, and by now other sounds were audible, or rather, he could feel them through his feelers and via his bat-like ears. He was too deep down to make out words, of course, but the hum of conversation did reach him, if barely. The voices held a tenseness that might have been fear. And the heartbeat was clearer, now: a thump-thud of machinery, something with the hiss of steam.

The machinery--whatever it might be--lay farther ahead. The voices started just overhead; perhaps that was the wall's demarcation point. Other, stranger vibrations came from much farther out, and to his right: sporadic clanging, like metal on stone, and it rocked through the tunnel around him. Whatever this was was not particularly strong. It wasn't mechanical. It was people, doing... something, to the rock.

He might explore further, or choose one of these places to erupt from. Or he might prefer to try and emerge somewhere quiet to see what he was working with.

The world was his oyster, if the oyster was a walled city full of dangerous (but edible) soldiers.

Above Gravedigger's head, where he carefully slotted rocks into place, some domesticated Rock Wolf on a short chain and full alert began to bark.

It was, tragically, completely ignored by the workers, who weren't close enough to see the claws that had briefly broken through.

If only they had listened.

Back at the tunnel entrance, the Valkhound crowd had grown. No longer were they coming and going: they were waiting, eager, for Gravedigger's return. He had become a war-leader in the space of time it had taken him to dig, and a multitude of misshapen beasts listened with slavering jaws (literally; some were drooling black Oil at the prospect of violence) as he laid out his plan.

Almost as soon as he had finished, they began to try and split themselves into groups. But the problem with ordering Chaos was that Chaos was, well, chaotic. Someone shoved someone else. Two different Valkhounds tried to raise their voices and proclaim themselves leader of the same group, while another began to roar about who would be best suited to which; she was immediately argued with, vehemently, and someone started spewing black flames.

Three fights broke out, one of which involved no fewer than eight Valkhounds.

At length, however--at last, and after one limped back missing a forelimb (someone else was now eating it triumphantly)--they had split themselves into two larger groups, and one smaller. Three of them had decided to go with Gravedigger, or rather, had won the right to via combat.

The first was long, lanky and purple, with a snake-like head and neck and a furry mane down its back, its long tail ridged with spines and ending in a barbed spear. It had two sets of forelimbs, and jutted out one clawed, seven-thumbed hand to try and shake Gravedigger's... talons. "Galgrin. We're coming with you. This," they went on, jutting those too-many-thumbs back toward their two friends, "is Snarl, and that's Piru." They didn't have designations, or didn't use them.

Snarl was a hulking thing. She was built like a bear but purple and skull-faced, marked with glowing chartreuse rosettes. Piru was almost feline, like a large black leopard, but unnaturally long in the body and bore a second jaw along the underside of his ribcage, one that snapped and drooled impatiently. Galgrin, apparently their unofficial friends' group leader, grinned. "So when do we begin?"

The other two, much larger groups waited--listening and milling about in a mostly even split.

Someone's hand raised, finally, in the "underground" group. "So when you say we're attacking underground, you mean, uh. We're fighting rock?" A tragic misunderstanding, but this one didn't even seem to mind. If Gravedigger had directed him to fight the volcano, he'd have probably started biting then and there.

The die was cast, and all that. The first group poured from the earth: unleashed Chaos behind towering walls. Though Gravedigger did not wait to see what had happened, the shouts of alarm and guttural snarls told the story well enough. It would take a moment for what few soldiers remained behind to react, longer still for them to reach that place. It was impossible to know what sort of terrain the Valkhound forces had emerged into, but even if it were a killing ground, the slaughter would be one-sided for a time. All else aside, Kalizal was not expecting these beasts to erupt from the very rock that had so long defended their city.

The second group was loosed into someplace where the shouts of alarm were not cries for reinforcements. Instead, these were screams, those of women and children too; civilians, their safe havens breached utterly. The less said of the stench of blood and the sounds of ripping and tearing, here, the better. It was carnage that this Chaos eruption left in its wake. And it was unlikely, judging by those screams, that any true combat would take place here. That anyone would make it in time to rescue even a single soul.

It provided, almost accidentally, a distraction for Gravedigger himself. For as the alarms went up, the vibrations of fleeing footfalls overhead were clear as day through the rock.

The place into which he emerged was a vast pit, lower than other parts of the city, and was perhaps why its sounds had carried to him so clearly: it was simply closer to his digging. And it was clearly the heart of their industry. A vast, vast forge towered overhead: smoke-blacked steel embedded in the stone, glowing lava dribbling down from massive tubes and flowing into troughs created for this purpose. A great hammer, run by some steam contraption hidden behind the rock, clanged heavily on a vast anvil, across which lay blooms of iron still stained with their impurities. Forge, and anvil: and mine, too, the outsides of the pit half dug away by pickaxes that the fleeing miners were carrying toward the cries for help. The clanging, and the rush-whoosh of the automated bellows, sounded like the heart and lungs of some enormous mechanical beast.

It was lucky the Valkhounds had not come up directly beneath the contraption, or their tunnel would have flooded with lava. As it was, they were dangerously close, mere yards from the nearest glowing trough.

Gravedigger's jaws might have closed around well-anchored steel, but his three newfound allies found far better targets. Galgrin was up and over the ground, scrabbling on loose stone and then launching into the mine proper, in a flash. They slammed straight into a huge rack of supplies, toppling them without hesitation into a trough of molten metal. The next they hit a second later, moving from rack to shelf and setting it all to burn--or melt. There were roaring hisses of steam as everything was destroyed--the carefully procured metals, the tanned leathers, the chainmail and hammered, purified ingots. All was heaved into the open forges, thrown into the flowing lava, clattering together and vanishing in seconds. Black smoke began to gutter and plume overhead.

Piru chased the few lingering miners, or rather, those who had been too slow to leave. These were consigned not to lava but to claw and fang; the stink of blood was faint beneath the smoking stench of industry, their screams muffled under the THUMP and CHURN of the machines. The feline Valkhound then leapt ten feet up, launching onto an overseer's walkway to patrol for intruders. No one would be calling the alarm here for the next few minutes, at least. The pair, and Snarl, were clearly at ease working together; these roles came naturally to them, as though they'd slipped into them a hundred times before.

Bearlike Snarl was last, plowing over into the heavier support beams on the tail of Galgrin's work. Not only were the supplies being destroyed, but she was now hitting smoke-blackened steel, tearing it forcefully from where it had been set with concrete beneath the rock. Her muscles surged beneath the green-dappled pelt, and her growls were mixed with guttural laughter. The pit was rapidly being transformed from the organized chaos of prepared assembly lines and war supplies in various states of readiness... to piles of rubble and melting tangles of useless metal, clogging the lava flows."Might want to get out of the way, there. -We got any way out?" Snarl called, glancing to Gravedigger.

Maybe Gravedigger knew the place's layout enough to point them in a better direction, or maybe Snarl's have to hold off on the best part: drowning all the half-destroyed supplies in molten steel, ensuring that nothing could be salvaged. If they had no other way of leaving, then flooding their escape tunnels with molten steel and rock might not be the best plan.